I would venture to guess, just based on uncovered evidence, that America in the 1950's was probably more balanced from a cultural standpoint, than it is now.

Why do I say that? The evidence - weekend radio in America was a veritable grab-bag of music, information and culture - all laid out, usually in one place. In 1955, NBC Radio introduced a Weekend service called Monitor. It was an adventuresome idea, geared along the lines of America's then-insatiable curiosity over how things worked.

Monitor's credo was "go anywhere, do anything" and it lived up to that credo over a 48 hour period, beginning at 12:01 on Saturday morning until 11:59 Sunday night.

This episode of The Grand Ole Opry comes from that service. For a half hour (On June 22, 1955) it featured the talents of "Little" Jimmy Dickens, "Cousin" Minnie Pearl, Del Wood, Jimmy Newman, Chester "Chet" Atkins and a host of others. Strictly Americana at its most rural.

But here's the thing - right after Grand Ole Opry, Monitor went to Birdland and featured a set by Woody Herman and Erroll Garner, and a half hour after that, a set by Tyree Glenn and "Philly Joe" Jones.

And the next day, you got the NBC Symphony. Quite a blast of disparate culture, to say the least. But if you were up for it, you got one hell of an education in the space of 48 hours. And your musical taste got very broad and all-encompassing. And if you were a musician, you stumbled into a gold mine.

So as a reminder of how potentially isolated we've become as a culture, here is a half-hour of down-home rural/middle America/roots music, supplied by Mainstream Radio in the form of NBC on June 22, 1955.

The Jazz portion comes tomorrow.

Political humor of the 1950's - you don't really hear much about it these days. The forum for political humor has changed a lot over the decades. But in 1959 Political humor and social satire, like most social movements of the day, were considered outside the mainstream and relegated to the domain of nightclubs, college campuses and the occasional appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

But that's not to say the message was buried, and comedians like Mort Sahl rose to prominence during a time when questioning where our society was heading was just getting started. It was also a time when FM was slowly coming into its own and that proved to be a great launching pad for a lot of consciousness raising, politically as well as culturally.

I ran across this broadcast, originally aired over a local Los Angeles FM station (KRHM which became known as KMET and later The Wave) who happened to have a recording of a Mort Sahl appearance at L.A. State College in September of 1959. As far as I know, it's never been available commercially and it's classic Mort Sahl.

You may need to Google many of the names he mentions, like Claire Booth Luce, but you'll get a taste of what the political climate was like from a non-mainstream perspective. And that could be instructive or ironic, since a lot of the issues Sahl talks about are issues we're still dealing with some 50+ years later.

And further evidence some things just don't change, and may never change.

Here is a performance by Mort Sahl, as recorded at L.A. State College and broadcast by Les Claypool over KRHM-FM in Los Angeles on September 30, 1959.

A few months ago I ran another Sauter-Finegan Club date, also from Chicago and also from 1953. This one is earlier by a month and wasn't part of the All-Star Parade of Bands series put on by The Treasury Department. This was part of a weekly show broadcast from the famous Blue Note Club in Chicago and was first broadcast on August 12, 1953.

Different song lineup, with the exception of the Band's Theme (Doodletown Fifers), and there's a few technical goofs in this broadcast (the engineer couldn't find the right vocal microphone for the first number), but it settles down by the second number and the audience is pretty happy.

So if you're wondering about the Big Band scene in the early 1950's, Sauter-Finegan was one of the bands to watch at the time. However, as it worked out, the climate was changing fast and the writing was on the wall for Big Bands in favor of small outfits, as was evidenced by the announcer giving news for the upcoming broadcast the following week with Art Tatum's Trio. There would be a lot more Trios and Quartets in the future - it was just the economic nature of the beast.

It would be impossible to imagine someone like Dwight Eisenhower being around today, unthinkable in our current state to even remotely consider him as Republican Presidential material.

But even during his time as President, he was often criticized as being out of touch, certainly within his own party. It did earn him the nickname of "old bubblehead" among the Press corps. And maybe he was the first of what eventually became a long line of "Figurehead Presidents" - those who knowingly or unknowingly left the back door open and paid little attention to the real culprits in the administration and his party, slowly dismantling democracy, one seemingly innocuous department at a time.

It was said he was at loggerheads with his own administration - coming from a Military and not a political background, not understanding why being Commander-in-Chief didn't afford him the same leadership platform as Supreme Allied Commander. That in the end he expressed a level of sadness and frustration that much of what he tried to accomplish was thwarted by political interests and undermining.

But in 1954 he was still looking at it all rather optimistically and on May 31st he delivered an address he called "Man's Right To Knowledge And It's Free Use Thereof".

President Eisenhower: “Amid such alarms and uncertainties, doubters begin to lose faith in themselves, in their country, in their convictions. They begin to fear other people’s ideas, every new idea. They begin to talk about censoring the sources and the communication of ideas. They forget that truth is the bulwark of freedom, as suppression of truth is the weapon of dictatorship. We know that when censorship goes beyond the observance of common decency, or the protection of the nation’s obvious interests, it quickly becomes for us a deadly danger. It means conformity by compulsion in educational institutions. It means a controlled instead of a free press. It means the loss of human freedom. The honest men and women among these would-be censors and regulators may merely forget that the price of their success would be the destruction of that way of life they want to preserve. But the dishonest and the disloyal know exactly what they are attempting to do; perverting and undermining a free society while falsely swearing allegiance to it. Whenever, and for whatever alleged reason people attempt to crush ideas to mask their convictions, to view every neighbor as a possible enemy, to seek some kind of divining rod by which to test for conformity, a free society is in danger. Whenever mans right to knowledge and the use thereof is restricted, man’s freedom, in the same measure disappears.

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit, from revolutionaries and rebels, men and women who dared to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”

By today's standards, radical Left-Wing stuff. It's interesting how often Eisenhower is now quoted on the Internet, even during a recent rally at Occupy Los Angeles, to cheers and loud applause.

A former Republican President, lumped in with "those bongo-playing weed-heads" - the mind fairly reels.

But I think Ike may have gotten it.

Back to the French Radio Transcription Service this week with a performance of the Faure Ballade for Piano and Orchestra featuring keyboard legend Jeanne-Marie Darre and the Orchestra of the French Radio conducted by another legend, Manuel Rosenthal.

Since there are no dates written on the discs, estimates are based on scribblings by broadcast engineers on the jackets. This one makes reference to 1956. I suspect it's earlier and probably 1955. But in any event, it's a performance that's been unavailable until now and, even though the original 16" transcription discs have been badly damaged, the performance is a memorable one. Sometimes history is just full of ticks and pops, but you have to take it however you can get it.

Enjoy.

Back over to the French Radio Transcriptions this week. Music by Germaine Tailleferre. A member of the legendary Les Six of composers, Tailleferre was one of the first women composers in France to achieve International prominence.

Tonight it's Ouverture for Orchestra, a work she composed in 1932 and is heard here in this mid-1950's (1955?) Radio Broadcast performance with the Orchestra of The French Radio conducted by Eugene Bigot.

As usual, it's highly doubtful this particular performance has seen the light of day since it was recorded and it's equally doubtful a more recent recording was made of this work, since most of what has been issued of Tailleferre's work consists of vocal and instrumental pieces.

This work certainly shows off some of the influence of the others in Les Six but it more importantly illustrates the vast untapped reservoir of brilliant and gifted women composers were emerging in the 20th century.

And Germaine Tailleferre was in the vanguard.

If you think the Hippie Movement of the 1960's was the most parodied, lambasted, pigeonholed and marginalized era by mainstream media, you have only to listen to this documentary, produced by KNX Radio in Los Angeles in 1959 to know The Beat Generation won that dubious achievement hands down.

Titled The Beatniks, this one hour look at the Beat Generation as it was happening in Venice California was narrated by noted 60's and 70's Astrologer Sydney Omar and hosted an interesting cast of characters, headed by the somewhat self-appointed guru Lawrence Lipton who figures prominently as spokesman for all that is Beat and Bohemian in Los Angeles at the time, even to the point of proclaiming The (Greenwich) Village and North Beach (San Francisco) were no longer relevant, but now The Gas House in Venice was. Once you get around the rather quaint and self-conscious proclamations, there are some interesting people who were legitimately influential forces in the Beat Generation, among them Kenneth Patchen and Stewart Perkoff.

So it's an interesting listen, even if it is slathered over with a lot of marginalization.

But then, that's the 50's anyway, and mainstream always.

Continuing our look at 1950's Pop with Hollywood 1950's up-and-comer Barbara Ruick and one of the very few singles she recorded for MGM Records in 1951. Long a staple in the Pop music diet, the crossover of Hollywood names with the recording studio had been around as long as movies and records were being made, going back to the days of Rudolf Valentino, who managed to make one record during the course of his brief career.

And so it was Barbara Ruick's turn, and the end result was this sultry little number Serenade To A Lemonade which made a brief appearance in 1951.

It didn't make much in the way of chart action, but probably didn't hinder her career either and the likelihood this recording has been reissued seems a bit remote. It's a breezy footnote in the crossover annals of Pop Music and Hollywood.

As so much is.

1950's Pop Music leaned a lot on gimmicks in order to stand out. Since Capitol Records had done so wonderfully well with Les Paul and his unique electronically-altered guitar playing, Coral Records attempted to follow suit by signing South American Jazz Guitar sensation Laurindo Almeida and recording a series of discs that sounded a lot like Les Paul clones but didn't make much impression on the charts in 1952.

Tonight's track is one of those gimmick-infested songs. From that series of sessions Almeida recorded for Coral in 1952 Delicado, like the other recordings from this series is an electronic tour-de-force and shows off Almeida's pyrotechnics, but it also shows his considerable talent which, in all honesty, was put to better use in other genres.

After his brief foray into the Pop Music World, Almeida upped his efforts and returned to Jazz and later Classical, leaving this handful of singles as something of a forgotten legacy. I'm not sure and I halfway doubt Delicado (or any of his other Pop efforts for Coral) were reissued on either lp or CD. As always, this is off the original 78's, so there's no way of knowing.

There was a time, if you were at a gathering of strangers in Los Angeles, the question would invariably be; "so where are you from originally?" Seemingly no one who lived in Southern California was actually born there - they had all been imported during the Great Migration of the 1950's, where cities east of the Rockies suffered a massive drop in populations and Mecca's like Los Angeles swelled accordingly. It was mostly about the weather, but it was a lot about the freedom - the "wide open spaces" as it was touted in ads. The escape from the rat race of the City, whether it was St. Louis, or Chicago, Detroit or Pittsburgh - the pot of gold was at the end of the road which just so happened was Los Angeles.

In 1959, more or less at the mid-point in the "massive migration", CBS Radio as part of their Great Challenge radio series of documentaries, did an in-depth look at the subject of these "20th Century Nomads", hosted by veteran newscaster Howard K. Smith.

Ironically, it was broadcast on January 4th, 1959 - I wonder if the weather everywhere east had something to do with it.

Maybe a little.